A Vision-Based Technique for in-Flight Measurement of Helicopter Blade Motion

The measurement of helicopter main rotor blade angles during flight is a key capability to implement advanced applications, such as strategies for the reduction of emitted noise and to develop innovative flight control laws. The approach proposed in this work for the real-time estimation of blade angles is based on a stereoscopic system mounted on the top of the main rotor and pointing to an optical target placed on the blade root. An advanced image-processing algorithm was developed to match the target features in the left and right camera images, which was required for the 3D reconstruction of the target based on a triangulation method. This algorithm was customized for the target used in this specific application, in order to implement a procedure that is both reliable in blob matching and characterized by a very low computation effort. This allowed the system to speed up the triangulation procedure aimed at obtaining the 3-D coordinates of the features, in view of real-time applications, even with very compact processing units that can be accommodated on the main rotor head. An inverse problem for the 3-D rotation of the target was solved using the Singular Value Decomposition technique, thus improving the robustness of the measurement. The stereoscopic system was developed in order to be integrated on board an AW139 helicopter main rotor hub, equipped with a synchronous lighting device and a pre-processing unit. The latter enabled the system to automatically extract the minimum set of information to be transferred, by means of a slipring, to the processing unit hosted in the fuselage. For the full assessment of the reliability and accuracy of the integrated system, harsh dynamic and accuracy trials were conducted on laboratory test benches. The harsh dynamic tests demonstrated that the system can work continuously in realistic conditions without any structural or data acquisition problems. The accuracy tests, based on a robot test rig simulating the motion of the blade, demonstrated the capability of the system and the accuracy of the measurement technique developed. The discrepancy between the reference blade angles and the estimated ones was found to be less than 0.360 for all the realistic blade angle combinations tested.